In 'Panoptica' I had considered implanted brain chips but dismissed them as too far-fetched. Crime rates are low because nobody remembers any crime happening to them. Victims are re-educated and given a pill that eradicates unpleasant memories (it already exists). Nobody remembers being a victim of crime therefore there is no crime.
My first thought was brain-chips because that made it easy to get the main character into trouble. His chip would report non-Righteous thoughts. Then I decided he wouldn't have any non-Righteous thoughts as a fully indoctrinated drone so found another way to get him in trouble. That also avoided unlikely science fiction scenarios like this one.
Yes, even the stuff I rejected as being way too far-fetched has started coming true.
The scientists doing these experiments are not evil. Their intent is to find a way to repair the damage done by things like Alzheimer's or by feral scroats who happen upon an innocent member of the public. Then again, Einstein did not envisage his equations leading to a bomb that could wipe out a city - and the new ones that can wipe out a large chunk of a country.
Darwin did not imagine his evolutionary theory could lead to eugenics. If van Leeuwenhoek had known about bioweapons he might never have built those microscopes.
No, the scientists rewiring rat brains have no evil intent. Unless you're a rat.
However, those in charge of us have nothing but evil intent. Take this innocent-sounding scientific sentence:
'It's a proof of the concept that we can record information from the brain, analyze it in a way similar to the
biological network, and then return it to the brain,' says Prof. Mintz...
The authoritarian mind will add in a few words there:
...we can record information from the brain, analyse it, adjust it to suit what we think they should be thinking and then return it to the brain...
One small step for science, one giant leap for the authoritarians.
And I thought it was too wild for fiction...
3 comments:
"Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence"I guess "Strategies for Longevity" was already taken?
Well, here's a nice scenario for you (which has been done to death many, many times before so you'll need to find a new angle): first, you have implantable chips which enhance cognition and memory. Next, you network them with suitable controls to prevent spamming and DDOS attacks rendering them useless; a system of Government-controlled cryptographic keys to lock out attackers might do the trick.
Since a human brain is essentially a gigantic neural network capable of huge amounts of parallel processing, it won't take long for a Govenment/military neuroscientist to work out that this could be tapped in to. Simply dream up a hypnotic TV programme (some sort of soap opera) which when the viewer sees it, triggers a fugue state where the viewer's brain can be accessed as part of this computer network, the viewer being unaware of this and fed plot details of the soap opera via subtitles, their brains then supplying false memories of the programme they have just "watched".
So, here we have subtle enslavement of people by Government for who knows what nefarious means; quite what is it the Government is trying to process? I have a few ideas which borrow from a certain Mr Stross' conception of what demons actually are, but I'll leave implementation to you...
Implanted brain chips? No, no, soon we'll be swallowing them instead...
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